Editorial

Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.
Merchant of Venice, 3.2

When we conceived of The Literary Encyclopedia we intended that whilst it should provide reliable and extensive reference information about lives, letters and histories, it should, like the original Encyclopédie, also foster interventions in cultural debate. The idea that readers might come to a publication because it is reliably informed, but also because it has polemical elements, is familiar to readers of quality newspapers where the "Comment" columns invigorate the "News". So here, we are delighted to offer this first "supplement" to The Literary Encyclopedia in the confident expectation that it will be the first of many which will move beyond the necessarily factual and circumspect into a different kind of authority, that of well-made argument and scholarly interpretation.

In this our first issue we offer a six essays, an original short story from Zimbabwe, a first translation of a Russian story by Boris Pil'niak from 1928, and an introduction to a new software suite for humantities teaching. The choice is deliberately eclectic and the scope broad. Whilst the essays were not assembled with any particular logic in mind, having been brought together by patterns of mutual interest and respect, so it is the more interesting to see how the waves of the cultural unconscious arrange our thoughts: even before the explosions in London in July 2005 two of our writers were preparing essays on terrorism, one in relation to Milton, another in relation to Salman Rushdie; as Tony Blair and Bob Geldoff made public waves about Africa and the colonial legacy, one of our contributors was continuing his long campaign to direct attention to the post-colonial horror of the Biafran war and the consequences of British interference in Africa; another was writing stories about Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, another dreadful colonial legacy. We also offer a revisionist essay on Plato that considers how the shadows on the wall of our cave are animated by ideas of terror and ideas of the good which need close philosphical inspection. Each story and essay has manifest intrinsic merits which we hope you will much enjoy as you read.

We welcome contributions for our next issue, planned for the Spring-Summer of 2006.

Robert Clark
December 2005.